Sadly, we have to face the fact that today's world is not exactly a very secure place, at least as far as confidential data is concerned. For this reason, most serious enterprises are protected by several firewall layers, all of which are constantly supervised by a well-trained IT department.

Unfortunately, maintaining such a department is a pretty costly thing, so mid-size and smaller companies don't really afford hiring multiple highly-skilled IT gurus. And in order to help these companies maintain a relatively OK level of data security, Netgear has just launched the ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall (SRX5308), the first business firewall to provide in excess of 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) performance for under $500.

The ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall (SRX5308) features a hardware-accelerated data flow architecture that enables 1 Gbps LAN-to-WAN of stateful firewall throughput. Furthermore, the SRX5308 gives remote users the ability to build VPN tunnels to the corporate office to access centralized data using the IP Security (IPsec) standard or software clientless Secure Socket Layers (SSL).

The SRX5308 firewall supports up to 125 IPsec VPN tunnels and 50 SSL VPN tunnels simultaneously, for enhanced protection from network security threats. IPsec VPN tunnels deliver secure site-to-site tunnels connecting multiple offices together, as well as legacy, client-based remote access. SSL VPN tunnels enable clientless, individual remote access to corporate data, anytime and anywhere — without needing to install a software client. In addition, the SSL VPNs support industry-strength encryption algorithms and features such as automatic cache cleanup after session termination to ensure protection and privacy of sensitive data.

The device can be described as a high-performance, SNMP-manageable network solution providing multidimensional security, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attack protection, Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) to curb hacker threats, URL keyword filtering, SYSLOG support, configurable hardware DMZ port, e-mail reporting, logging and real-time alerts. Moreover, four Gigabit LAN ports enable maximum internal data transfer speeds, while the four Gigabit WAN ports provide two modes of session-based load balancing, as well as failover protection to ensure maximum throughput and reliable connectivity to the Internet.

"As businesses increasingly rely on Internet bandwidth-intensive applications such as cloud computing, Web 2.0 and social media, and outsourced applications, they require a high-performance network that doesn't leave them exposed or vulnerable," said Jason Leung, NETGEAR senior product line manager for SMB Security. "With four Gigabit WAN ports, session-based load balancing and a multitude of configuration options, our SRX5308 ProSafe Firewall is able to achieve ultra-fast performance between networks.


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